Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by flukus on Friday December 01, 2017 @02:10AM (#15822457)

> I discovered looking at these that there was an error in the spreadsheet double-counting all inputs (rows and columns were added and the row-totals included in the grand total). Best I can tell, finding that bug was not in fact part of the course goal....

Multiple times I've come across issues like this when developing the replacement for an old access system. The numbers between the new an old system don't match, so you have to dig through both to find the error. If the error is in the new version that's great, but when you tell the boss that the error is in the old one and they've been off by a few million dollars over the years...

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by beobab on Friday December 01, 2017 @03:25AM (#15822688)

Been there: "No. The old is correct. Make the new way match."

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by johnbellone on Friday December 01, 2017 @07:34AM (#15823436)

A mistake plus keleven gets you home by seven.

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Re:Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Co... by GFischer on Friday December 01, 2017 @07:23AM (#15823403)

Yep, Excel is an easy way to lose a few million dollars.

However, development costs are so expensive they might have broken even when factoring the cost of creating a system.

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